Coronary artery disease is a common ailment that affects millions of people. Coronary artery disease may cause the blood vessels providing blood to the heart to develop lesions, such as a stenosis (abnormal narrowing of a blood vessel). As a result, blood flow to the heart may be restricted. A patient suffering from coronary artery disease may experience chest pain, referred to as chronic stable angina during physical exertion or unstable angina when the patient is at rest. A more severe manifestation of disease may lead to myocardial infarction, or heart attack. Significant strides have been made in the treatment of coronary artery disease including both medical therapy (e.g. statins) or surgical alternatives (e.g., percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG)). Invasive assessments are commonly used to assess the type of treatment a patient may receive. However, indirect or noninvasive assessments for formulating a patient treatment are being explored and developed.
Heart disease is typically viewed as resulting from vessel disease, in particular, narrowing of the vessels or blockage inside vessel lumens in a way that impacts blood flow. One way to measure the extent of this narrowing or blockage is through a perfusion scan, since perfusion is the flow of blood through a vascular network (e.g., arteries, capillaries, etc). Currently, perfusion scans may be costly and may expose the patient to unnecessary radiation. Thus, a desire exists to use available patient information to estimate perfusion in certain target tissue, where the estimated perfusion data may be used to simulate a familiar scan type, for example, single positron emission computed tomography (SPECT) or positron emission tomography (PET), so that a physician may be familiar with how to read the image. Furthermore, a desire exists to improve treatment of cardiovascular disease by better assessing the severity of cardiovascular disease.
The foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory only and are not restrictive of the disclosure.